Hive
by Desdemona Kakalose
Summary: How about the time Worth had to be rescued like a damsel in unequivocal distress? Hannapocalypse, year three.


_Hive_

You may recognize this from a tumblr prompt fill. You may not.

* * *

Virginia

year three (sometime after _Tooth and Claw_)

Normally, Conrad thought, there would have been more investigating. He supposed he ought to be grateful to have that whole step skimmed off the top, but truth be told he was going to miss it. He liked the investigation step. Every once in a while, the monster turned out to be a rabid dog or something. He lived for those days.

"And you're sure it's fairies who took these guys," Hanna said, scribbling in his Lisa Frank notebook.

The farmer and his wife exchange a nervous glance. They were just an average couple of survivors who had been lucky enough to have some stock put aside when the troubles came, and the whole business with magic seemed to have rattled them. Well they could join the club, couldn't they.

"Reasonably sure," the wife said. "I mean. They had wings and all."

Hanna looked up sharply from his notebook. "Wings," he repeated. "Like, butterfly looking things?"

The woman nodded, looking like she wished she hadn't said anything at all.

Hanna made a hissing noise as he flipped upward in his notebook, looking for some page in particular. "You wouldn't know this," he said, "cause like, why would you? But fairies don't actually have wings. You've got your two major subcategories, big and little, and none of them have wings."

"They were, um, they were about the size of a large child," the woman offered, "but like an adult body. I guess they weren't exactly butterfly wings, but. Kind of. Like that."

Conrad, hanging around in the corner, sighed heavily and looked up at the ceiling. They needed more sourdough and vitamins and a place to wash their awful laundry, and Conrad understood that what Hanna specialized in was just another kind of trade, but god damn did he wish they could go a week without narrowly escaping death in exchange for their meals. Doc Worth looked like he was thinking about the same thing. He had that patent impatient scowl.

Conrad realized he had pressed his fingers to his lips. Then again, narrowly escaping death could have its... benefits...

Hanna was still chattering his rapid fire interview at the farm owners, but Conrad had already moved his attention to other things.

The farmer's wife, who had shuffled in and out of the kitchen like a toy train on a track for the last hour, finally seemed to have figured out what she was doing. Conrad watched her bustling with vague interest, trying to keep his eye off Worth with moderate success. She was holding a cookie sheet, the next time he dragged his attention back to her, and was clinging to it with white knuckled hands.

"Snacks?" she asked, heel bouncing off the worn carpet.

"Er," he said, "No, I don't-"

"Take one!" she insisted, too brightly. "I made plenty!"

Conrad thought about pointing out his fang in case she hadn't noticed, but then figured, hey, why not be human again for a couple minutes. Take a cookie. He'd give it to someone else later.

It was still fairly early in the evening when the four of them shuffled out of the house, and Conrad was grateful for the smooth rolls of mountains blocking the late summer sunlight. They had the camper parked near the house, out of the way of the crops that hadn't yet gone out with the high of the season. They were also trying to stay out of the way of the refugees tending those crops, because yeesh, those guys had enough work on their hands without throwing Hanna on top of it.

Hanna, for his part, had a light in his eyes that bid no one good. He'd wedged fingers into so many pages of his notebook that it looked like the thing had been attached to his hand, and he was scanning the field for something, god knew what.

"Wings," he said, absently.

"Ain't never seen wings on a spook come to think of it," Worth admitted begrudgingly. "Cept fer some bird wings once 'r twice."

"The fairies with wings are a 19th century popculture phenomenon," Hanna told him. "You know how things go, long enough without a sighting and people start to do the whole telephone game thing. Information takes on a life of its own. I'm wondering if this isn't some kind of prank, personally."

Conrad lit up. The investigation phase was back on! There was hope!

"So uh," he said, trying not to sound too eager. "What are we gonna do then?"

Hanna grinned at him and then struck an explorer's pose. "Alright gang," he said, "let's split up an look for clues!"

"Dibs on Freddy," Worth said, immediately.

"But you _always_ call dibs on Freddy," Hanna whined. "I said the line, I should get to be Freddy."

"He _did_ say the line," the zombie added.

Conrad mouthed _help me_ to the unforgiving sky, and, when no help was forthcoming, grabbed Worth by the arm.

"Come on," he said. "I'm Velma and you're all a bunch of tools."

-A-

A thin fog had settled over the valley that Conrad had picked at random, and the temperature had dropped a bit as the night wore on. Honestly Worth and Hanna should have just gotten some extra sleep tonight and just let the two dead men handle scoping for clues, if they were that pressed for time. It was only a day or two past the new moon, and much too dark to see. Worth's borrowed lantern swung with a faint creak in his boney fingers, bobbing a bit too much to be of any real use.

"Empty house up ahead," Worth said, nodding toward the splash of darkness down the path.

"Yeah," Conrad said. He could make out a couple unbroken windows. "It might still have some supplies in it. Are you thinking about raiding it?"

Worth made a little clicking tongue noise. "Nah," he said, "was thinkin' about gettin' ter second base."

"Ahaha... ha..." Conrad replied, uncertainly. "Funny?"

"Is it?" Worth asked. He seemed to have spotted something interesting on the path ahead, though, and his response was preoccupied. He made a beeline for the pickup truck parked along the roadside.

"Er, I dunno," Conrad mumbled, "is it?"

Worth had vaulted up over the side of the truck bed and paused now with his hand in the tool box mounted just behind the cabin. "Ya gonna keep mutterin' over there or are ya gonna help me dig inter this thing? Reckon a backwoods place like this oughta have some decent tools."

Sighing, Conrad went to help him inventory the find. He wondered if Hanna was having any better luck with Benvolio out east of town. Maybe he should have picked the caverns to search instead. At least caverns were mildly interesting.

Worth tossed a wrench over his shoulder which Conrad caught, automatically, and then promptly dropped. "Shit," he said, "iron, right. Look, I'm gonna see if they have some gardening gloves or something in that garage, will you just- will you just hold on a second?"

Worth grunted, neither affirmative nor necessarily negative. Well. Good enough.

Conrad left Worth holding a tire iron, since iron had a long standing truce with Worth and his vanilla mortal body. It was a short walk but his head was processing and reprocessing so quickly that it felt dizzyingly longer than it should have. What exactly had that second base comment _meant?_ Was it just another typical misogynistic joke about breasts and so on? Had those jokes ever actually been _just_ anything? What the hell had been going on in Worth's head all these years? He fumbled through standard garage junk on autopilot.

What about the kiss? _Kisses?_ It had just been an... adrenaline thing, right? They hadn't said anything about it the day after-

Conrad came back out of the darkness shaking his head, determined to keep his head down and get through this without embarrassing himself, only to find the road empty. He had only been around the side of the garage for a moment, just long enough to get his gloves, but now Worth was nowhere in sight.

He squinted into the darkness. Where had that bastard—

Something twinged along his neck. He twisted reflexively, uneasy, and caught sight just in time of Worth swinging the godforsaken tire iron directly at the place currently occupied by Conrad's head. Conrad shrieked—it wasn't his fault, okay, anybody would have—and ducked backwards. He lost his balance in the motion and landed in an ungainly crouch looking up at the speeding arm of the tire iron. He swore, rolled, and came up hands out in front of him a few feet away.

"Worth!" he shouted, "Worth that is not even slightly funny! Have you gone mental?"

Worth only stared. His eyes were blue and mirthless.

"Oooh," Conrad said. His stomach dropped. "That. That is not good."

Worth lunged again, but this time Conrad was the stronger one of the two, and he would have been faster as well if only he could have broken free, but Worth had always been a better fighter and now those monster-dropping moves were aimed at a new target.

"Worth," Conrad said, "snap out of it! I don't know what's going on in there—" he paused, horrified, and nearly caught a blow to the temple— "or who," he corrected, scrambling back just in time, "but I know you're gonna be mad as hell when you find out about this!"

There was nobody in the area to call for help. They had figured that Worth was enough of a guard to reckon with any smalltime bandits or troublemakers. The two of them had taken on enough challengers together that Conrad had begun to think of them as something of an invincible team. Oh, he should have known better. Of course the moment he started getting cocky…

"This is so typical," he muttered.

Worth's whole body shuddered, as if he'd been struck with a tuning fork, and he paused in his assault just long enough for Conrad to get his feet back under him again. His eyes were terribly dull, but now the muscles of his perpetually bruised eyelids were twitching frantically.

"Come on," Conrad said, lifting his palms slowly, "you don't want to hurt me. I mean. Actually you _do_ seem like you want to hurt me most of the time but not like _this_."

The shudder returned with such force that Worth actually dropped the tire iron. "Kill that bitch," he said, but it came out strangled and half formed, as if the beginning of the sentence had been lost somewhere in his throat.

Conrad flashed forward, got a hand around Worth's shoulder and another one around the back of his head. "Worth," he pleaded, "Worth talk to me, what's going on, what do you need?"

"Sold us out," Worth managed.

"Who sold us out?" Conrad asked, settling both hands around the back of Worth's head now. His thumbs ran across the thin shell of the ears, a soothing motion that he hadn't been aware of starting. He'd worry about it later.

Worth only stared—either in fury or horror—and made faint choking noises. One hand lifted, painstakingly, as if to point—

And then Conrad was clutching at nothing, fingers hooked on empty air.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, _now_ I'm angry."

-A-

After Worth bodily disapparated from the abandoned farm house, Conrad made a beeline for the other side of town, leaving his good shoes, assorted clothes, and bags where they lay. He could fly faster than he could walk, even in a situation where the roads weren't impossibly tangled around lumps of forest and inconvenient rocks.

There were very few things that could move whole intact humans around at will, but he was fairly certain that Fey were among their numbers, if they put their minds to it. He was running through his mental list of options when the glinting roof of their host's farm caught his eye, and a sort of mental reel kicked into motion. _Sold out_. Worth was savvy about these things, the paranoid asshole. Suppose...

Conrad dove for the farm, transforming a couple feet off the ground too soon and rolling the rest of the way to the garden. Nice. He shook himself off and tried to make the best out of his terrible underclothes, hoping that this would all turn out to be a colossal waste of time and he could carry on to where Hanna was.

"Hello?" he called, meandering through the yard. "Um. Shit what were their names. Mister and Missus Farmer... people..."

He climbed the steps and pushed open the front door. In the warm kerosene light of the kitchen, the woman of the house paused with her mitt halfway into the drawer, coming to a halt so sudden it defied the law of inertia. Her pupils dilated. From across the room her could see it happening, could smell the anxious chemicals flooding her blood stream over the soft scents of baking. Her last rack of cookies was cooling on the counter top between them. Her unease echoed inside him and amplified, setting off waves of instincts as it bounced from neuron to neuron. The obvious question finally occurred to Conrad.

"How..." Conrad started, shifting laterally across the floor, "how did you get all the supplies for baking cookies out here?"

The mitt dropped from her fingers.

"How are you able to spare the supplies for snacks?" he continued, eyes narrowing. "In this day and age?"

"Har_old_!" the woman shouted, voice rising and shattering at the height of its pitch.

Conrad swept across the kitchen floor. In the space of a single sharp intake of breath he had both her wrists in his hands; he'd met too many people who could take him right out of the game with one really well placed spin of the wrist. Wherever Harold was, he wasn't going to give him time to get involved.

"_Where's my friend_?" he hissed.

The woman rolled her eyes like a spooked horse. She didn't know. She swore up and down that she didn't know, she didn't even know which one his friend was. Conrad could feel precious seconds scrolling past him as she stuttered through her panicked defense. He was trying to parse anything useful from her, trying to decide if it was more or less dangerous to let go, when Harold finally arrived.

"What are you doing here?" the man shouted, his voice cracking like a child's. God, how did anything get done in this marriage?

Conrad cursed, screwed down his own anxiety as tightly as it would compress, and spun the woman around between himself and the door. "We're changing tactics," Conrad informed them, coldly. "Tell me what I want to know and I leave."

"What do you want to know?" the woman squeaked.

"Where. Is. My. Friend?" Conrad repeated.

Harold seemed to be sharing a desperate silent communication with his wife. "We don't _know," _he said.

He believed them. He was pretty sure he believed them. But if that was _it_, if that was all he got, then what was even the point of being _in_ this group? He had a snap of insight. "Where do they live?" he demanded.

"Where do who?"

"The—the fairies, fuck, whatever is taking people, where do they live?"

Harold shook his head, looking like his skull was about to rattle right off his shoulders. "No," he said, "Oh no. We can't talk about them."

Conrad bared his teeth. "Do you see these?" he said. "Do you understand what they mean?"

Harold looked like his own teeth were chattering. His wife was mostly confused, as far as Conrad could tell. He hoped that this would be enough, that the threat was implicitly conveyed - his mouth, her neck, his strength. He wasn't certain he had the stomach to actually say it, especially not when she could _hear_ him. Harold held out just long enough to crank Conrad's frustration up to maximum decibels, and then he crashed. Information overflowing its banks, jerking hand motions, stuttering circular sentences, the man poured out like a broken vase.

The fairies, he had choked out in a terrified whisper, were frightening patrons to owe. Turned out that Hanna's friends were not the first people to pass through here. If they managed to actually leave after all this, though, that would be a first. Turned out, there are kinds of fairies that still live in forts, and they are a hell of a lot meaner than the stern thoughtful ones who show up so punctually for all the council business.

Turned out, it was up to Conrad to find them.

The flight was short, a pretty straight shot into the dark hillwork of the caverns. Conrad knew caverns, unfortunately, and had no trouble deciphering the faded notices on the welcoming station. He'd kept an eye out for Hanna as he flew over, but in the crush of foliage he hadn't managed to spot anything but a nervous looking deer coming out of a thicket until so much time had passed that he began to grow truly nervous. When the flash of orange eyelights finally came, Conrad crashed through the roof of the forest with almost dizzy relief. Hanna seemed happy enough to see him, but already strung tight with some other unnamed tension. He took the news in stride, maybe too easily. He had news of his own.

"We've been investigating the markings," Hanna told him, beating his way through the dense underbrush largely through sheer force of will, "at the mouths of some of these caves, and I've been cross referencing a couple witnesses against the known material—"

"Witnesses?" Conrad said, ducking under a branch Hanna had just let go.

"The refugees who work on the farm," Hanna said. "They've seen more than they really wanna talk about."

Conrad frowned but jogged to keep up, not wanting to be outstripped by Hanna's tiny determined legs. He supposed that Harold and his wife wouldn't have wanted them to know about any other witnesses, not really, not when they were never intended to solve the disappearances anyway. Hanna stopped, finally, at the opening of a small cave, mostly buried under a flow of dirt that looked to have washed up in a battery of storms over the years. He tapped a weird geometric pattern carved into the exposed rock and looked vaguely sheepish.

"This is where the entrance is, as far as I can tell," he said. He ran a thumb over a complex hexagonal shape. "I think this one means _home_, but I wouldn't swear to it. I tried to go in but—"

He gestured vaguely to a smear of dirt down his otherwise well maintained shirt. Behind him, the zombie radiated disapproval.

"I figured you could help me dig it out and then we could both go in. I was just gonna do some recon, but if they have Worth then we might need to do some day saving instead."

Conrad looked at the tiny opening. There was no way they were going to dig that out before morning without tools, and every minute that passed was another minute that something could go horribly, fatally wrong. But he knew caves, didn't he? In the sense that he had spent nights in them before, and in the sense that a part of him, now, was bred for them down to the very genes. That was fine. He could do this alone. There was no time to go searching for back up, no timetable to pit himself against, and anyway it wasn't as if he needed to go crawling back to Hanna every time something went wrong. How many disasters had he survived? How many days had he saved?

"You wait here," he said. "I'll see how far I can get."

Hanna grabbed his arm. "Conrad, dude, you cannot go in there alone."

_"You_ were going to go in alone."

Hanna waved one hand desperately. "Look, I have experience, I know the lore, I'm good at improvising! I can do this, you can't."

"I'm not any less capable than you!" Conrad shouted, jerking his arm free. "Do you people not _notice_ that I'm out here doing just as much dangerous shit as any of you? What the fuck do you think I am, your team mascot?"

"Connie," Hanna said, placatingly.

Conrad jabbed one finger at him. "Don't you _connie_ me like I'm your senile old grandmother! I'm stronger than I was, you know I am!"

Hanna looked down, rubbed his hands together for a moment, and then sighed. "I know," he said at last. "I mean, I'd have to be a total idiot not to, right? But I can't send you off alone to deal with these things, I couldn't stand it if something happened to you."

"I'm not your responsibility," Conrad said, a little more coldly than he intended.

In the first months of their friendship—_friendship,_ Conrad still thought uneasily—Conrad had been left behind every single time, locked out from the action while Hanna and his partner and even _Toni _had been out daring and doing. And it wasn't as if Conrad was enthusiastic for risking his life and limb, but to be the one left outside? To be the one banging on the doors, physically unable to follow? He imagined that they though they were doing him a favor. It was maddening. Then there had been the terrible early months of the disease and the travel, his inability to do anything about the grueling work of the daylight hours, Hanna's thick depression—once more, left out from the action in a misfortune disguised as mercy. It seemed like no matter what he did in the years since, nothing was ever enough to catch up with the figures of his own friends.

Hanna let out a sharp, dull laugh. He was looking up at the roof of leaves, washed black and grey in the nighttime. "You know in Boston," he said, "when we thought you were dead, I walked for miles up and down that river trying to find you."

Conrad shook his head. He had done what had to be done, and he'd have to be pried out by the metaphorical fingernails before he accepted guilt for it. "I'm not your responsibility," he repeated.

"Yeah you are," Hanna said, softly. "Of course you are."

The moon punctured tiny holes in the canopy above them. Conrad had never seen Hanna in the light of day; they had met under florescent lights late in his last evening and after that it had been too late. The man was sadder now than he had been, and harder. The world was wider than it had been, and heavier to carry. Responsibility, he thought with a faint shudder, had worked its terrible magic on the not-quite-child who had once absently allowed Conrad to die.

Hanna smiled. "They're insect like," he said, as cheerfully as if nothing had transpired here at all. It made Conrad vaguely sick. "They have a queen, I think. They're either very old or very new, or both, and I bet they'll have their own rules you'll have to play by."

"It probably won't be too difficult," Conrad said, by way of inadequate apology.

"Probably not," Hanna conceded. "Appeal to chivalry. Get in, get out, get Worth to help you."

Conrad nodded.

"Hey," Hanna added, as Conrad started to turn away. "You know you don't have to prove anything to me, right?"

Conrad shrugged, not knowing anything of the kind.

"I _know_ you're a badass," Hanna said, palms open. "But nobody expects you to do everything alone, badass or not. Not even Worth."

Conrad shrugged again, more aggressively.

"Dude, we're a team, that's how we get stuff done. None of us is Indiana Jones, don't get caught up in trying to prove something you don't gotta prove."

Conrad felt his face darken, sluggish capillaries filling up with thick blood. He wasn't doing that. He totally wasn't doing that. Was he?

"Look who's talking," he retorted, feeling unexpectedly naked in a way that had nothing to do with tiny biking shorts.

Hanna sat down in the thin grass. "Yeah," he agreed, "we all know I have a tendency to throw myself under the nearest metaphorical falling rock without regard to life or literal limb. But that's what I have all of you for, and now it's what I'm doing for you. Don't get caught up. I'll be here if you need me, as long as you're gone."

Conrad looked down, transformed with a silent puff of magical discharge, and then swooped through the tiny opening before he could _really_ embarrass himself. He hadn't realized how transparent they all were.

Conrad landed in the dirt at the mouth of a cave, touching his fingers to his lips half without realizing it. He could do this. He could do this alone. He needed to do this alone, to know in the aftermath what was true. But on the other hand, wasn't this just part of an ever-increasing trend lately? There was this thing almost like a hunger, only growing more desperate with each successful attempt to prove himself. He'd heard of adrenaline junkies, of course, and maybe it was something like that on the surface, but Hanna had cut him deep without so much as breaking a sweat. Underneath, there was a toxin oozing up. He wondered vaguely whether Worth's machismo bullshit was finally catching.

The path down into the throat of the earth grew too steep, eventually, and he had to lift back up into a smaller form to glide down. The descent proceeded in that way—a tight spin of claustrophobia and release, competing instincts—until he arrived at a narrow slit of light too bright and strange for the hollow of the earth.

The court of the fairy queen looked like someone tried to throw a rave inside a catacomb and was interrupted by the rapture. You had to dig your way through the first foot or so of dirt—his nails were absolutely ragged—in order to even reach the entrance, and then you had to climb down the alice-in-wonderland looking tunnels spotted with bones and faintly glowing mushrooms. And then, just when you would think you'd gotten used to it, the path opens up into this monstrous cavern draped with unearthly organic shapes.

Definitely a different kind of fairy.

It seemed like a party had been in progress for a long time now, possibly longer than Conrad wanted to contemplate. It wasn't the genteel but politically tense world of the Seelie fey, or the psychedelic uproarious Unseelie, or even the barroom brawl of the Redcaps; it was wild and ragged and teeming with dimly lit life. The inside of a termite mound, Conrad thought.

The diminutive figures swarming the cavern seemed only dimly interested in him as they skittered across the ceiling and dove in gleeful aerial displays. What _were_ they interested in, if not unannounced invaders? Conrad wished for some clothes to pull around himself. The edges of the cavern had been carved to look almost like ribs, curving up towards the ceiling, and at the far end of the room there was a towering stack of animal bones propped up between the huge columns of stalagmites. At the top of it—he squinted to see—there was a lone figure in a seat carved out of down-dripping stone, and at the foot there was a single, human, shape.

Conrad took a deep breath. They were small, but an army of children is still an army. He certainly couldn't take on this whole hive alone. He remembered Hanna, above him on the surface, and considered returning to him. With two, or better yet three, you could engineer a workable hostage situation. Hanna had been right, of course—there were things that none of them could do alone. But maybe there was something that could be done here, while he was still uninteresting enough to pass untouched through the writhing movement of the colony. Maybe up there, at the throne.

Conrad grit his teeth as he climbed up the uneasy staircase, femurs and pelvises shifting under the weight of his feet. The queen—Hanna had called it a queen, anyways—watched his climb with a shark like expression he found immensely unnerving. Worth was at her feet. More specifically, he was holding her feet like an overgrown ottoman. Oh, if they both got out of here, Worth was never going to live this down.

She blinked her huge dark eyes slowly, and the frenetic music of the dimly lit hall faded around them.

"Are you the mortal doctor's champion?"

Conrad narrowed his eyes. "Am I his what?"

"Are you here to rescue him?" the queen clarified, a faint scowl twisting her lovely and terrible face. She poked Worth with one delicate foot as if for emphasis.

Conrad thought fast. He knew a little bit about Tam Lin and a little bit about duels now, he had Hanna's second hand knowledge of fairy tales, his own strength, and a narrative on his side. He could do this. Possibly.

"Well," Conrad said, shaking shards of bone out of his shoes, "it's definitely a rescue of some kind."

The queen looked at him expectantly for a moment. She was beautiful, in an alien sort of way, with her delicate frame and her intricately braded hair, and he was certain that she could strip his bones of meat with her tiny perfect teeth at the first sign of aggression. A kind of first-day-in-high-school uncertainty settled over Conrad, who rocked back on his heels and tried to ignore the overpowering urge to check his watch. Which didn't even work anymore.

"_So_?" she said.

"So, um, what?"

The fairy crossed her legs, kicking Worth across the cheek in the process. "Aren't you going to profess your love? A declaration of intent at this point _is_ traditional."

Conrad's eyes widened. "Whoa," he said, "let's not get ahead of ourselves. Can't a guy rescue another guy without it being a love thing?"

The queen tapped her ivory throne impatiently. "A mortal may only be rescued from the thrall of fairie enchantment by the power of true love. If you are not his champion, please cease wasting my time."

"Is this what you guys do for fun, put people in uncomfortable emotional positions? Am I being fairy punked?"

She blinked her uncomprehending eyes. Yikes.

Conrad bounced nervously. "Damn," he said. "Er, can he hear me?"

"He is as if in a dream," the queen replied. "He skates dimly over the frosted surface of this world, observing without memory, comprehending without concern. Now, are you his champion or no?"

"Well," Conrad said, hunching over a bit, "He's… I mean he's got… you can really count on him, I guess. And he always has something to say. And he's got… really beautiful hip bones, I mean, as an artist I…"

The queen raised one elegant brow.

Conrad took a deep breath. Forget tiptoeing around the script, he might as well say it now, while he had the chance. "I am the champion for Luce Worth," he said, forming the words carefully, "for whom I would walk to the ends of the earth, and I will not be turned away."

"_There_ we go," the queen purred. "Now, we battle!"

She snapped her fingers and a guard of figures swooped from the shadows of the ceiling to gather around her, each slightly less humanoid than the last, carrying arrays of dangerously crafted objects.

"As is the ancient honor," she continued, rising from her seat in a sinuous wave, "you may select your weapon, child of night."

This was not going to be a fair fight. There was not a single option available to him that he was even _slightly_ competent with, and he was pretty sure they weren't going to take a time out to let him go upstairs and fetch his rifle. Conrad looked back and forth between the fairy and the weapons—her talon-sharp teeth, the impossibly curved swords—and then down at Worth, who was twitching again. A muscle in his cheek was jumping as if something under the skin was desperately trying to wriggle out.

He was really pathetically fond of Worth, and he'd very much like to win himself another kiss, but Hanna had been right. There are things that none of them can do alone, and the moment he forgot that was the moment he set himself up to fail. He touched his lips. There would be time still.

"Oh, what the hell," the vampire said. He crouched down in front of his partner and very gently took one of his limp hands. "Worth," he said, "listen, this is very important. Are you listening?"

One of Worth's fingers twitched.

"Worth," Conrad said, "I poured out all your booze this morning because I'm putting everyone on a cleanse diet."

Worth's eyelid ticked twice, and then like a scourge of lava exploding up through a volcanic cap, he opened up his mouth and shrieked, "Ya did _what now_?"

Conrad threw himself backwards, out of swinging range, and looked up at the queen, who had drawn back in shock at the outburst. On the ground between them Worth was panting and twisting, glaring at the circle of figures with a kind of crazed animal fury. He lurched to his knees, muscles tensing in preparation for some building onslaught. Conrad sat back and smiled with all his sharp, inhuman teeth.

"Well that's my weapon," he said. "What's yours?"

-A-

Days later, as they sorted out the hideous mess of human rights that the farm had turned out to be built on top of, Conrad would turn to Worth and say-

"To be clear, you couldn't have taken them on without my help."

It would be nearly morning, faintly pink with dawn, when Worth would snort, and he would reply, "I can take anyone, anytime. Wait till yer the one trotted off by a buncha miniature loonies, you'll see. I'll tear open the goddamn ground."

"My hero," Conrad would say, in what he hoped was a scathing and sarcastic tone.


End file.
